Customer Driven Management: Outsourcing

If you want to lower cost in todays sales and service world one of your first options is outsourcing. Whether within the USA or to some other country around the world outsourcing can lower your cost. In fact, lowering your cost is the number one reason to outsource. This is followed closely by a desire to "leave the work to the professionals", focus on our core competencies, global/seasonal support issues and last but not least an expectation for better customer satisfaction and sales/profits. Not every company is willing to outsource. Many choose to retain sales and service as an offering directly from their employees.

Customer Driven Management is the "outsourcing" of your coaching, advice, instruction, feedback and encouragement to your customers. This form of outsourcing is open to companies who have chosen to outsource their operations and to those that have kept services in house.

Let's look at Customer Driven Management is through the lens of outsourcing results. In CDM:

1. We don't outsource to another company; we outsource to our customers.

2. We don't decrease our cost by paying another company less than it costs to do ourselves; we reduce our cost by enabling customer resources to perform functions we pay our employees to do for us today.

3. We do "leave the work to professionals; the professionals are our customers.

4. We do "focus on our core competencies"; we learn and change from the voice of our customers.

5. We do outsource for "global/seasonal issues; we engage customers everywhere and round the clock.

6. We expect better customer satisfaction and higher profits; we are closer and more connected to our customers. CDM impacts first call resolution, customer loyalty, employee turnover and customer experience. All of these areas increase customer satisfaction and impact the bottom line profitability of the organization.

The negatives of outsourcing ( We respect and appreciate professional outsourcing of all types. A well thought out decision to outsource combined with a professional delivery benefits customers and companies. It does have strengths and weaknesses.) are loss of control, risk of alienating pre-agitated customers with delivery of service from outside the company (international or domestic), and loss of connectivity with customers. Done right outsourcing can be spectacular. Done wrong and it is a nightmare. There are also many companies that would never outsource because they feel that the core competency of delivering sales and service is not something they are willing to give up or have reside outside of their company.

With CDM, there are no similar negatives to outsourcing to your customers:

1. Customers provide advice, instruction, feedback and encouragement. Each one of these increases company perspective and most important employee perspective. Customer advice received by an employee is credible and valued.

2. Only customers that seek to provide you with advice participate. There is no risk of agitating customers that do not want to participate.

3. This is the "ultimate" connection with your customers. They connect directly with your employees. Customers that are involved are more loyal and more likely to stay your customers. Customers providing input develop a vested interest in your company and your people.

Outsourcing your coaching to your customers is a win-win-win. Customers, employees and the company all win.